The Furies Clear A Path
by pax.nemesis
Summary: Immediately post-finale. What Stefan has, what Damon wants, what Katherine came for. Everything is certain: the only variable is Elena. Destiny, but for our own blindness.
1. Everything's Alright

_The Good News: a) Ultimately D/Elena, b) the flowery writing/exposition at the beginning doesn't last long, c) doing my very best to keep it cannon - TeeVee cannon, that is._

_The Bad News: a) D/Elena joy is a very long way off (just warning you - our girl is very much with Stefan), b) I wrote this without rewatching the finale - it is compliant with the show right up until Real Elena gets home and heads for the kitchen. Pretty self explanatory, though._

_Just Awful News: It turns out I don't own The Vampire Diaries. That was a shock. A friend broke it to me, and I had to Wikipedia it to make sure. Ruined my weekend, let me tell you._

~Everything's Alright

Founders' Day was over – the night, nearly so. There was an hour yet til dawn, and after a sleepless night of tears and consolation Stefan and Elena lay in companionable silence. She felt truly safe, for the first time since her initiation to the supernatural world.

_No_, she corrected herself. _Since my parents died_. It was then that she became attuned to the glint of mortality in all living things, things which she had overlooked in the rapture of her triumphant teenage debut. Stefan and his brother were a cherished reprieve from that stasis of guilt and depression – they were beautiful things which gave a convincing impression of life, and cast only the shadow of death.

She was comforted by them as her mother had been comforted by religion. They were a touchstone in her life; there was safety in the knowledge that she would break before they would, should it ever come to that. They were constants in a life that could boast of so few.

Among the blessings they'd counted was the town's reprieve from vampires, at least for a while. Knowing that she need not worry about the people she loved for a night was fabulous. Shock-induced contentment fell over the two as they lay awake, a mild breeze stirring the bottoms of the huge old trees that thatched the sky outside the leaded glass windows of Stefan's room. Night insects and morning birds sang, as committed as a Disney chorus.

He obligingly kissed her cheek as she lay on his chest, his arms around her. "And what will you do next in a vampire-free Mystic Falls?"

"I'll probably get really clumsy. And careless. I'll have to make sure to wound myself a lot, in public places. Otherwise I just wouldn't be taking advantage of it."

He laughed.

"And then I'll have to go looking for my vampires, because my Mystic Falls should never be without them."

"You couldn't use a break from us?"

"What are you implying?" She asked, anticipating a roundabout confession. This day had been a ride on the rickety wooden rollercoaster at the emotional carnival of her adolescent life. She did not need this.

Lightly, he replied, "Maybe we'll pack up the three rings and pageant wagons of our ridiculous circus, Damon and I, and find somewhere far away to let the tigers run free."

"Either you and Damon have a strange, secret hobby or you're asking me to go on a roadtrip."

She was obstinate, angry that this had once again come up. She was rigid in his arms. "As unlikely as they are, I think those are much better interpretations of your stupid metaphor than 'I can't control my thirst'. You really date yourself when you refer to pageant wagons, by the way."

He shifted to look her in the eye, arms still tight around her waist. She hated feeling like a child, but waste and repitition brought out the petulance in her. The prospect of loss chafed at old wounds.

"Elena Gilbert, I love you. The way I feel about you makes me wonder if my entire life has been leading me to you. It makes me wonder if you aren't the reason I didn't die an old man."

She felt that bloom of love fill her insides. But it couldn't stop the teasing look that came into her face, the wit that had sparked in her lately like a frayed wire. Half-grinning, and looking up from beneath hooded eyes she said quietly, "Do I complete you?"

On cue he held her close against his body.

"You are my life now," he smiled.

She laughed outright, unconscious for a moment of the silent, sleepless house that held them deep inside itself. There was no repose to disturb; only heavy shadows to tease with an easy laugh.

They did not pursue the issue of his leaving.

Citrine dawn plumed into the sky. Elena's heart beat with that lonely fatigue that settles in when one shares wakefulness with the long night, and lives to see it slain by the advent of morning.

The sounds of early birds picked at her dry eyes.

It stung her, somewhere deep, that she wasn't the reason why Stefan walked alongside her now: to blame, or to thank, was Katherine. Everything was because of Katherine.

XXX

Of _course_ the Lockwoods were werewolves. Hereditary werewolves were as easy to pick out in a crowd as new vampires. And it wasn't a hard genetic trail to follow – a dominant gene, inherited through the male line with few exceptions. If all the vampire-inquisition nonsense hadn't been going on back in the day someone probably would have figured it out then, too.

Damon could not resist an internal _duh. _Being pathologically self-absorbed was actually becoming a detriment.

However, there weren't many baddies, beasties, and heavies – besides himself – to worry about anymore. He could fit in his requisite Damon-time and still keep an eye on the young Lockwood. The surviving, genetically Lycan Lockwood.

He sped away in a jacked car – told the compelled owner where to find it later, for shame – towards a certain street, from the hospital where he'd visited his earstwhile playmate and dropped in on his new supernatural buddy, Tyler 'Lycan' Lockwood.

Damon liked the nickname, a lot. He couldn't decide if he sincerely liked it, though, with its fancy alliteration, or if it was more an ironic appreciation.

He dismissed it. He was way too cool for that shit, anyway.

He had kissed Elena Gilbert, after all.

Just a few hours ago, moonlight and lamplight creating a warm wash over the stage of her front porch, he had thanked her, and kissed her. At the risk of being uncharacteristically self-reflective, he decided that he had kissed her out of appreciation for what she'd done for him. She was the first friend he'd had in a long, long time, and with her strength, honesty, and perhaps naivete she had invited him into a close and valuable network of allies. He had more than just his wits to rely on now: he had a powerful Witch in Bonnie, and a wiley (and impervious, if not infallible) vampire hunter in Alaric, both of whom begrudgingly had his back at the request of a righteous brown-eyed girl.

He was sure she could command the stars, if she decided to be friends with them.

When he thanked her, she had looked at him in a way that told him it was unnecessary – that she understood what he meant – and why – better than he did.

_She looked at me like she knew – she'd always known._

And she kissed him back like she'd done it a thousand times before; that there was never any question of her returning his affection. Love was mercurial, and he wasn't about to dip into that particular poison again. But what he felt between them was a connection not so far removed from love as untouchable and resilient in ways that love couldn't be.

It had felt like time would never break that bond.

She had given him physical assurance that he deserved her as much as his brother did. That he too was worthy of happiness and belonging.

It was just a matter of asserting that right, and of making sure that things didn't go wrong this time. This time there were no variables; as a human, Elena had no 'choose both' option. She could not compel them, she could not turn them: her persuasive abilities were potent but limited next to Katherine's.

It was their game, Stefan's and Damon's – and Elena, in sharing her love between them, had asked them to play it. This time, only one could have her.

Damon had a good feeling about his chances.

XXX

As he careened along the streets of Elena's neighbourhood, towards Elena's street, he thought about the moment he'd get to Elena's house and then climb into her window. He would get into Elena's bed and drink Elena's blood. And Elena would let him.

Elena. He couldn't say her name enough. It was never repitive; in three syllables it awakened the metre of a waltz.

But Damon didn't dance anymore.

He slowed down as he turned onto her street. Immediately, he was stopped by a roadblock of silent police cars, lights still spinning as officers interviewed neighbours. An ambulance was pulling through the small lane they'd left open. Its siren began to wail just as it hit the main thoroughfare.

Another waited at the end of a drive; at the end of the front drive of a house he didn't know he'd recognize so quickly. A gurney carrying an occupied black bodybag wheeled slowly through Elena's front door. Damon could smell the spilt blood from the end of the block. It was like standing in the middle of a seaside scrapyard. Or like licking a rusty nail.

His heart stopped as the possibilities began to run amok in his mind. It swiftly started again as he saw a lithe form, wrapped closely in a robe of deep blue, standing in that pool of light where he had kissed it hours before.

It was a pleasant change from pink flannel pajamas and bunny slippers. He wondered if she'd ever caught Stefan chewing on one in his sleep. He had asked her that once, earning a dirty look.

What an inappropriate memory. He really only made exceptions to his personal code of immorality when it came to her safety; seeing that it was assured, he mentally whistled his merry way back to the boarding house. While he would love to take advantage of her grief, he needed to get ready to fight whatever the hell it was that had (probably) decimated her entire family.

He felt another stab of guilt when he considered that Jeremy may well have used Anna's blood to turn himself. New vampires did not screen out family and loved ones when pursuing that first decisive meal.

He continued on. It made little sense to traipse through a crime scene crawling with police officers in order to find Elena's stash of vervain tea, which would be ever so helpful at a Mystic Falls garden party, but not so much in a fight.

Although he hoped she would remember to drink some. He texted her while driving in a way that humans should never, ever do:

To: [Elena]

_Pretty girls don't forget to drink their vervain before bed...and you look lovely tonight._

XXX

Elena's phone vibrated on the marble countertop of Stefan's ensuite bathroom. Rinsing the last of the conditioner from her hair, she stepped from the hot shower into the warm air of the bathroom. The window was open, letting in a cool morning breeze. She looked out the window – the glass was clear, not frosted, because it was three stories up – and searched the canopies of the trees outside for any sign of a large glossy crow.

It was compulsive – she searched for that damned crow like she had searched for the boogie man in her closet as a child every night before bed. It was a superstition reaffirmed by the dangerous new life she led, and it tapped into her fear of the latent violence inherent in dark and evil things. However, it also allowed her to relax – as a child, enough to sleep; as an adult, enough to ease the adrenaline that shot into her blood much too readily these days.

Once she was satisfied that she was alone, she checked her phone.

_Pretty girls don't forget to drink their vervain before bed...and you look lovely tonight._

From: [Damon]

That feeling returned. The boogie man didn't have to sit outside her window to disturb her cultivated serenity.

With all the conveniences of the modern age, he could make her feel hunted from wherever he happened to be when the urge struck him.

She wrapped herself in a towel and ran a wide-toothed comb through her hair. It had taken three washes to get out the matted, gluey hairspray. Unlike her doppelganger, her Other – Elena would not ruin her morning by mentionning her name, even to herself – she could not hold a curl. Stylists pushed hot tools and product to their limits to do for Elena what they easily did for others.

She left the bathroom, safe in the privacy of Stefan's empty bedroom.

On a folded piece of stationary he had written a note. _Hunting_, in Stefan's mature calligraphy, was all it said.

It was clipped with one of her fallen bobby pins to the ear of her bunny slippers, waiting for her on the bed with her pajamas. It was funnier from Stefan, but it was a second-hand joke – it could only make her think of Damon.

Stefan was so thoughtful, leaving her things out before taking care of himself. He knew quite well that she would sleep away the rest of the long summer day and only emerge for dinner.

Dinner. Dinner was a long time ago, and she planned on missing lunch. The only option was Breakfast. Elena slipped on her bunny slippers – minus the note – and wrapped the towel more firmly around herself. She would try to let her hair dry for as long as possible before she put on her pajamas. She left the room, and began the long climb down the stairs to the kitchen.

She felt, but did not hear, the door slam, and vibrations of feet moving with unnatural speed through various corridors of the house. Feeling well-concealed in the big white towel, she continued down.

_I have to face him eventually, and it might as well be now. He isn't such a bad guy, after all._

Elena felt the lie – she couldn't even rationalize its conditional truth.

_I rather like him. As long as I remember that his baggage doesn't have to be mine, and that he wounds because he's wounded, our relationship might not be doomed from the start._

True, and important, but not very concise.

_He's erratic, but predictably straightforward._

It was spot-on, but she couldn't work out why it wasn't oxymoronic. Maybe if she was well-slept and fed, but not now.

_He treats me like any other human, because he knows I'm not Her._

He knew it, and it kept him perpetually at arm's length. He would never feel for her what he had for Katherine, so their interactions remained wonderfully unambiguous. Disrespectful, manipulative, laden with motives whose obviousness negated their ulteriority, and divinely simple. She could appreciate that.

Stefan, she thought, gave her a taste of what it might have been like to have been loved like her Other was loved. Passionate, doting; every time he touched her it felt like she died, and it was bliss.

His love was a force of nature; an inevitability. It was fate finally sliding into consequence. It was Destiny. It was Meant To Be.

_It has to be. Nothing in the world is like this._

Elena thought this as she descended the last flight of stairs, wet hair like a rope over one shoulder, a shy smile as she thought about being the centre of another person's universe. It felt like something she couldn't name, and it was wonderful.

Damon looked up from the case he was packing with vervain ampules. He was motionless, expressionless. He felt numb. This was one hundred and fifty years coming, and he wasn't prepared.

Anger welled up – how dare she smile at him that way? It was too late to shut down, to act cool, like this wasn't killing him. Whatever he thought he felt about her, he loved her and she had broken his heart. He hated her for that.

Elena smiled a small, puzzled smile. He looked like he had seen a ghost. "Long time, no see," she joked, trying to match his banter. She was still working on that.

His eyes filled with blood and the veins below his eyes dilated, filling black. He lept on her, and faster than she could follow she found herself looking up at him as he pressed her down into the red-carpeted stairway, crushing her organs beneath a knee.

She was winded, her smile and breath gone in the same instant. Her mind was blank, except for a small echo in the bright, snowy static of her shock: a simple, fluttering question.

He pressed a hand to her windpipe, closing it completely. She began to black out.

She batted her eyes like the coquette she was. Her cheeks filled with blood. The pain of his betrayal was too much, and he saw nothing but Katherine and her artfulness.

He stabbed the vervain syringe into her side. He leaned in close.

"You never called," he hissed through enormous, glistening teeth.

XXX

_Thanks for reading! Lots lots (lots) more is planned and in the works. Just in case you were worried._


	2. When We Become

_So, for all that I __(passive-aggressively) __harass authors to update frequently, it seems I'm very bad at it myself. Excuses aside, though they are fairly good, I truly do intend to finish this - all of it - before Season 2 starts. I've got a much better idea of what this whole deal will look like which means I'll procrastinate a bit less (because it's a bit less daunting). In any case, thanks for reading! Still rated T, for language._

_I'm actually glad that I don't own The Vampire Diaries, because I would (still) want to do filthy things with Damon (et al) and then I would be no better than ol' Stephanie M. Zing! Don't hate, she said so herself!_

~When We Become

The Gilbert house was silent when Jeremy slipped back into consciousness. Dying with his eyes closed, his first experience of the world came through a scent. Beyond the smell of his own vomit, dried across his face and sour in his mouth, he could sense – almost feel – a rusty aroma pouring over him like honey.

Without a visual anchor, he felt like he was sinking in it, drowning in it – like all those times he'd gone to bed drunk, closing his eyes and wishing that his head would stop reeling so that he could sleep.

But this intoxication – it was gentle, slow even. Like time had stagnated, letting each torture-slow moment turn his powerlessness into something exquisite.

But he had to open his eyes. There was whispering in the house, someone speaking low and quick, and he wondered absently why his house was filled with the smell of blood. He blinked to adjust to the light of his bedside lamp. It was bad enough to be dying alone; he hadn't wanted to die in the dark as well.

Stumbling to the washroom he shared with Elena, he moved his limbs experimentally and found them no different. In fact, the feeling of familiarity went deeper than his skin. He felt that ever-present weight of sorrow pulling him back into bed, back into his pill bottles and dime bags he had escaped into after his parents' death, and resisted after Vicky's. For a while there had been something more; he had to be sober to find Vicky, he had to be sober with Anna.

Once again he found himself cut loose from those people who grounded him, and he wanted so badly to drift back into old habits, to avoid, to deny, to self-medicate with anything he could get his hands on.

But he shouldn't want that. Rather, he shouldn't _need _that. Becoming a vampire was supposed to let him escape all of his grief and still live. It was supposed to be a way to avoid the pain of being human without letting addiction ravage and destroy what was left. It sounded too good to be true, certainly. Now it seemed that it probably was.

But Damon and Anna couldn't have lied to him about this. They had no reason to. And now Anna was dead, and he was completely alone: there was not a soul he could look to for guidance.

He splashed his face, rubbing it clean with Elena's facewash. He brushed his teeth, that familiar minty taste sealing his disappointment. He pushed Elena's door open crack, though multiple drives were telling him not to: what if I have to talk to her? What if I want to eat her?

But the room was empty, the desk lamp on. Her clock radio read three-oh-three.

Drying his face, he slipped into the hall. The whispering continued, words hanging just below his comprehension. His hearing had improved, but it was no better than before he had killed his it with concerts and iPod earbuds. But it was definitely whispering, and it was coming from Jenna's room. The air in the hall was thick with blood, and he struggled to keep his focus while he pushed through it.

He stopped just outside Jenna's room, laquered wood door reddened with age, and closed his eyes. He ignored the itching dryness building in his throat, and listened; it had a rhythm to it, a metred give-and-take, with a distinct refrain.

It wasn't Mr. Saltzman. It sounded female – it sounded almost like Elena. It was Elena's voice, but with a subtle, gravelly edge, like a smoker's.

Elena sounded level, calm, persistent, like she was speaking to a child. Jenna was listless, dreamy; half-compelled, half-resistant. She had herbal tea with Alaric after their dinners at his place, and it left enough of a shield to repel gentle compulsion.

"_Jenna, look at me. Look at me, Jenna."_

"_He wouldn't do that. Let me up, Elena, I have to check on Jeremy."_

"_He did, Jenna. You're not listening. Look at me."_

"_Damon wouldn't do that. Why would he do that?"_

"_Because Damon is a bad person, Jenna. I've told you this. You need to listen."_

"_But he likes you. He likes all of us. He wouldn't. Let me up, Elena, I have to check on Jeremy."_

"_But he did, Jenna. He's a bad person."_

"_I saw you kissing him. He wouldn't do that to us."_

"_Damon killed Uncle John. Uncle John is dead in the kitchen because of Damon."_

"_Uncle John isn't dead. He's my age. Let me up, Elena, I have to check on Jeremy."_

"_I can't let you go, Jenna, not until you listen to me. Look at me."_

Strictly speaking, of all the people Jeremy had to mourn over, Uncle John would never make the list of Notables. He was just another casualty – of what, he frankly didn't care to know.

"_Is there someone at the door?"_

Jeremy was still as death – the creaking spots on the old wood floor could not have betrayed him.

There was abrupt silence on the other side of the door. Like frightened prey, all three froze and waited for a sound. The doorknob turned, and the door opened wide enough for Elena's tiny face to show through, though it was still withdrawn and shadowed. The room behind was dark, and smelled like lilacs from the tree outside the bedroom window. The window must have been open, letting full moonlight flood in.

Too late, he realized that his feet would have obscured some of the hallway light that seeped under the door.

Elena smiled at him, then slipped into the hallway, making sure she pulled the door closed just behind her. The burnished brass latch caught with barely a _snick_.

"Jeremy," she said, wringing innocense and concern from her smile to wash away the suspicion of her behaviour. Because, Jeremy had to admit, it was extremely suspicious.

She took his hands into hers, and looked up at him, deeply, with a studied expression of heartfelt compassion.

"Don't fucking touch me, Elena." Without missing a beat, he shook his hands free. She let them go, and clasped hers in front of her with another studied pose; this time, one of matronly worry. A flicker of genuine confusion touched her face, but was folded into the furrowed brow of her artifice a moment later.

"Jenna's taken ill. She's been sleeping since she got home."

He returned a hard, scornful look. "Are you kidding me? You think I couldn't hear you talking to her? You're a better liar than that."

He turned on his heel, dismissing his sister and getting caught in the riptide of thirst as he worked his way towards the stairs.

Another attempt. "Jeremy, I'm so sorry. Uncle John is dead."

"No shit, Elena. I could smell the blood from my room."

He hadn't taken a step before he felt himself crushed against the wall, ribcage compressed with the persuasion of a linebacker into the matte cream walls. Katherine's limited patience had expired and another word out of that insolent boy's mouth, any word at all, would set her off.

A part of her didn't want to break character yet. It was rather nice being Elena Gilbert, after all the people she'd been. Teenage girlhood was not an unfamiliar state; even she had been one once.

It seemed like a very long time ago, now.

She'd hoped she would have more time – until dawn would have been nice. She had a very long To-Do list in Mystic Falls and many of those things could have been accomplished effortlessly as a girl everyone knew and loved; needless to say, those who truly knew Katherine did not love her. She was a very polarizing individual, and generally once she was hated it was irreversible. She would have edited "generally" out of the thought as it was actually a certainty, but didn't want to discount the possibility of flukes of the universe. She was counting on one now.

But she would worry about that later. She had enough to keep herself occupied before she had to start betting on quantum aberrations.

In another life, she might have said she was hoping for a miracle. In this life, as a rule, miracles did not work in her interest.

Katherine pulled Jeremy off the wall, pinning his body to hers, back to chest, and with an unyielding gentleness she pulled his head back so that she could bury her face in his neck.

She didn't bother to think about how inappropriate that gesture was, given that she was currently Elena, sister of Jeremy. She inhaled, deep and slow, giving her inner monster free reign. She watched his pulse, and felt the blood moving beneath her fingers on his body.

She did not react. She desperately wanted to, but she didn't. There was nothing appetizing about his blood. She spent her life suppressing the transformation that would betray her, and now? Nothing.

Jeremy was Dead.

Straining for that hook that would get her, like it always did, she nearly cried when the nearest draw was the pool of vervain-laced blood coagulating on the kitchen floor. She didn't know why she nearly cried, but the redness in her eyes, as she slammed Jeremy back into the wall and headed for the bathroom, was not a symptom of bloodlust.

Maybe she'd hoped that he'd be a bigger person than that.

"Goddamn you, Jer. Go to your room," she called back. "I'll deal with you later."

Rigid against the wall, and numb with shock, he released himself slowly and looked on, dumbfounded, as Elena vented her anger on the bathroom door. He heard the water start running, through the support walls of the house, and the sound of the shower turning on.

There was something completely un-Elena about her tone. Elena did not have a pitiless note in her voice that, even in an offhand remark, held absolute certainty that she would not be disobeyed. This Elena did not offer up her woundedness in rituals of social bonding. This Elena, Jeremy thought disturbingly, was not his equal.

A forgotten, primitive instinct directed him to his room, where he stayed, staring obediently at the only blank wall.

XXX

The police came, and in a few hours questionned, collected, and left. Katherine directed the operation, whether the police officers knew it or not; she had showered to explain her absence, her obliviousness, until the time of discovery.

Now wrapped in the blue silk robe Elena had never found occasion to wear, she draped a flannel blanket around Jeremy's shoulders as he sat at his desk chair.

That endearing, concerned smile: "He's in shock. It's best that he be left alone for now."

They left without a word of argument.

Jenna's body, smothered into unconcsciousness but still alive, was loaded into an ambulance, and Uncle John's body was taken out, just as the sky was brightening with dawn. Closing the door on the last officer, Katherine wasted no time getting back into Jeremy's room.

He sat, huddled in the dark, pale and white and sweating and clearly dying – for good this time. The blinds were closed and curtains drawn, a preternatural undead wariness of the sun driving him to hole up for the day.

But he had been a good boy, doing what he was told and telling the nice officers exactly what he was supposed to.

Industriously, she went to the window and flung the curtains wide. She raised the blinds. Jeremy shrunk into the room's only shadowy corner. Katherine pulled open a dresser drawer and threw him a hoodie.

"Clean yourself up, Jeremy. We've got some errands to run."

She left him to dress as she went again to Elena's closet. Hanging among half-outfits, skirts and pants and shirts, was a spotless white sundress, pressed and ready to wear. Bare of embroidery and adorned only with a virginal white layer of lace peeking from beneath the hem, Katherine was instantly enamoured. That dress spoke of purity, innocence, clean slates and new beginnings. It had been a long, long time since Katherine had the gall to wear white.

On second thought, she had the gall but not the desire – playing the seductress was much more fun. But the time for that was over and a new era had dawned in Katherine's life. Well, an old era, but a second run at it, and this time she wouldn't be haunted by shadows of a forewritten future.

She donned the dress, which fell just below her knees, and tied the gauzy sash. Even if she could see blood spilled down the front, soaked through from collar to hem, as easily as she could look at the endless, peerless white in the mirror, in it she felt like the person she had intended to be.

She had really always intended to be that person, the one who could wear white and mean it. Having tried and been thwarted so often, she was left morally flexible at best, bereft at worst; people would get hurt in her pursuit of redemption, but such crimes could be added to the long list of those for which she would not be forgiven.

She wasn't about to let that stop her. But first things first – she had to sort out Jeremy.

XXX

Jeremy had locked himself in the bathroom when Katherine came for him a few minutes later. They had another fifteen minutes or so before the sun came up and there was really no time to waste.

Katherine had to prod Jeremy down the stairs, quite literally, and guide him with both hands out the front door. He pulled the strings of his hood so that it closed around his face, and pulled his sleeves over his hands. He had really not planned on dying this way, and while he wasn't sure what sunlight would do to a half-turned vampire, he wanted to put off the discovery for as long as possible.

That, and he was now deeply terrified of daylight. Even the chirping of the early birds was scaring the hell out of him.

Katherine pushed him down into the passenger seat and buckled his seatbelt over his crossed arms. She was toeing a pretty blurry line, between the human Jeremy thought she was and her true vampire self; still, she decided to walk around to the driver's seat at a human pace. It couldn't hurt to play the part, just in case there was a chance in hell that Jeremy still believed she was his sister. She didn't think he was that stupid, but she didn't underestimate the truth of that old adage, _seeing is believing_.

The bowl on the kitchen counter had held two sets of car keys, among others, and by chance she had chosen the right ones for Jenna's car.

"You could have left me, you know," said Jeremy, voice muffled by his hood.

Katherine started the car and began pulling out.

"So you could suck the blood out of the cracks between the tiles? I don't think so," Katherine muttered. Every moment that passed with Jeremy made her glad that she was the only teenager she'd had to raise.

They drove on in tense silence for a few minutes; the silence broke into argument for the next few minutes, as nearing death put Jeremy in a foul mood.

Reaching the centre of town, Katherine slowed down. She crept along, looking for that warehouse, that parking lot; things looked so different in daylight.

_Right, daylight._

She sped up. Jeremy would not thank her for dallying.

She spotted a carpark, gates swung wide, the entrance obscured by closely packed houses and foliage. Smelling smoke, she turned down the lane and parked at the door where the good townspeople had dragged their outed vampires to be killed.

Not bothering to lock the car, she helped Jeremy out – he was too weak to stand up on his own – and supported him, enshrouded in hoodie as he was, through the warehouse door. Once inside, he pushed it off his head. The space was unfamiliar to him, but it was dark. He wondered if she was going to leave him there til sundown, or until he died; if that was the case, he had a pretty good idea which would happen first.

She guided him down the stairs, supporting him as they jumped the last four that had burned away completely. The dark hallway on the floor above was bright as day next to the pitch-darkness of the basement.

Jeremy could see nothing, but Katherine, with a faint, feral yellow luminosity to her eyes, inspected the structural integrity of the room – or what was left of it.

She kneeled down and began manually investigating something on the ground. "Someone must have thought to close the door. Smothers the fire, eventually," she added for Jeremy's benefit.

He was leaning against the wall, too weak to support his own weight. He did not reply.

"I've got Anna over here, I think. Feels like her. A bit of hair left." She didn't need to mention that Anna was now a mass of crusted blackened bone. She didn't linger on her face – all a vampire truly has is her immortality, and the death of a friend was a poignant reminder that the guarantee of eternal youth and beauty was not an unqualified guarantee of eternal life.

She reached behind Anna's neck and undid the clasp that, mercifully, was undamaged. The rest of the chain had not been so fortunate; Katherine could feel the mottled, tarnished silver beneath her fingers, and the lapis lazuli that hung like a large, polished teardrop at the centre of the disfigured chain.

As an unorthodox goodbye to Anna, she thought _You look much better without a mullet._

Though the eighties had been good times – their last good times, as much as Anna had blamed Katherine for her mother's incarceration – most of her memories of Anna were much older than that.

The mullet had still been the worst.

Standing, she walked over to Jeremy, who had slumped down onto the floor. She took his hand and he was too weak to refuse. She wrapped the chain around his wrist several times and closed the clasp. She admired it in the darkness.

Disfigured as it was, it looked pretty cool like that, bound around his forearm.

She picked him up effortlessly and vaulted over the burned out steps back into the bright hallway above.

Dazzling in a white sundress, she carried Jeremy to the car and hit the gas towards the forest.

Soon enough she had reached its edge, and gently shook Jeremy awake.

"Jeremy, wake up – it's time to eat." She poked her head out of the car window, sitting in park, and inhaled deeply. The forest was crawling with hikers, lovers, and petty criminals, even at this criminally early hour.

She extended her arm into the sunlight, and watched it play over her fingers; a moment later a small bird, wild and flying too low, was clasped in the cage of her fingers. As its frightened chirping turned into a frenzied shriek she crushed it slowly, slowly in her hand, until it was silent, and there was only a line of blood rolling down her harm.

She dropped the wet feathered ball on the grass and licked her hand clean. Not the main course, and no gourmand's choice, but a fitting apéritif to a morning of desecrating the Disney perfection of the forest.

Jeremy's nose pricked at the smell. He shifted in weak restlessness.

Katherine smiled as she got out of the car, sundress a pristine, searing white in the morning light.

"And the eating is _good_."

XXX

_Though the continuation of this story does not - and will never - depend on how many reviews I get, I do dearly love them, for better and for worse. Do take a moment if you have one :) And to those of you lovely people who had already reviewed, my truly heartfelt thanks is in the final procrastination stages and should arrive shortly. So much love for you all!_


	3. Girl With One Eye

_Yeah...sorry. School? Battlestar Galactica? Crippling self doubt? Explanations, I suppose, but not excuses._

_I've been sitting on this chapter for a week because I'm afraid of what I've had to do. Really horrid things. Just so you know that I know this isn't okay._

_Do let me know how you feel about it :S I have nothing to keep me in check re: TVD besides you guys. Staying true to the characters is harder than I'd thought it would be._

_To be perfectly honest, as much as I love it, if I had ever owned The Vampire Diaries I would have traded it for Battlestar Galactica by now. And I certainly don't own BSG._

**Chapter 3: Girl With One Eye**

_Adrift in a small rowboat, tethered at a distance to the dock. Rocking gently, gently; wrapped in soft white fog. Silence but for the waves lapping slowly against the hull of the boat._

_No oars – not going anywhere._

_But cold and lonely on the sea off some grim coast was better than hell on dry land. The damp clouds wrapped close around her, benevolent. Obscuring with gradations of white the sight of her own body being beaten on the shore. Seeing only low-slung clouds in the half-light of her mind._

_Unseeing, she could still feel every blow._

_Sitting in that little boat, Elena tried to stay out of her own mind – tried to stay in the moment, with the soft white fog and quiet water. Screams echoed through her mind but stopped at her lips, thunder following close on lightning; if she made a sound, the spell would break, and her dark dream would become real._

_Damon also ran from a dream, trying to smother it with a new one; torn between running and fighting, he threw every punch as, in the spinning reel of that too-vivid film, it was thrown at him. His dream, after all, was a memory:_

_A momentary wind-up and a sharp jab at his jaw, and again, and again, sending his sweet blood across the bedspread with each impact._

Affective as a cut onion, Elena's blood hit the air and diffused into it even as it fell wetly to the concrete floor. It rushed quickly to fill, red into purple, the site of each blow. It ran unchecked from her split lip. The loss of salty tears was irrelevant and indistinguishable, just another fluid lost in the physical cacophony of her quickly mounting damages.

But Damon could smell those tears, and they won her no pity. Always the actress, his Katherine; always the one holding the cards, playing the cons, and never to be gotten the better of. Tears, for his Katherine, were no less tools of manipulation than were her seductions. Her mind the lure and her body the bait, she had taken him line and sinker.

Pierced through the cheek with that sharp hook of her mind and reeled into thinking she could belong to anyone but herself.

_His Katherine._

_Layers of frilled skirts piled riotously about her hips and thighs, she pushed him down by the shoulders, pressing his compliant form into the bed._

Elena struggled ineffectually against the vervain-rimmed manacles, hands secured unmoving behind her head and held immobile by their weight alone. He hit her again, and she spit a gobbet of blood onto the white towel still wrapped tightly around her small body from collarbone to mid-thigh. She sat on the bench, a medieval-looking hewn oak piece of furniture that seemed a constant fixture in the dark cell of the boardinghouse basement.

He gave Elena no better than Katherine had given him, and given again, more times than he could count. In more ways. This was mundane, a banal torture, overshadowed as it was by the soul-deep impressions he still harboured of their games. In fact, he doubted she would have found him an adequate partner as he played now – his cold cruelty was fragmented by hot emotion; run through, even, by barbs of need and betrayal, which, after years of tracking, had finally met their mark. Detachment was the key; in its absence, desolate rage drove him on.

_He breathed deeply, wetly, through his mouth misshapen with swelling and unable to close. A long, deep look- an abyss perched above him -and she slowly laved his face with her soft mouth, burning the length of his jaw with her fevered lips._

For a moment he saw Elena's soft brown eyes, artless and pulled wide by pure, bright fear. In bringing his mouth to her face, licking the places where he'd split her open, his apprehension of the austerity of those eyes was lost in the pleasures he took from her body as Katherine. He sat beside her on the bench and took her face into his hands, remembering the way those remarkably beautiful curves had felt under his fingers.

Not Katherine's, but Elena's. Not lifetimes ago, but last night. The way her lips had parted for him, soft and giving but willful, undeniable- those memories were of Elena.

It hadn't been so very long after all, he realized. And in kissing Elena he hadn't once been reminded of the kisses of another.

If he let himself, he could go back to that. After all, Katherine did look ever so much like Elena. A few shameful moments with her look-alike, using her as he'd been used. Moments like those achingly perfect moments he'd spent with Elena, moments which he might never have again as his fledgling conscience ran a collision course with reality.

So he'd let himself forget who that girl with the bloody lip and black eye really was. He would pretend she was Elena until he couldn't anymore.

A moment, seeing her through new eyes. He had never seen anyone more beautiful in his life.

Forgetting was easier than he'd imagined.

He wrapped an arm around her slim waist. With the other he reached across her back to gently pull her head aside, so that he might see her virgin neck.

He ducked his head into the hollow and nipped at her raised jugular.

Had this been Stefan, had her arms not been numb from their position, aloft but bent at the elbow so that her wrists met behind her head, and had she not been terrified for her life, she might have wanted such contact – wanted it in a way she could never admit.

_Stefan sucking fiercely at her wrist, tasting Damon's blood as he held her as leverage before the tomb had been opened_. There comes a point when the numbness of grief management become a permanent psychological fixture. Sometimes reliving her most visceral memories was the only way to remind herself of what it felt like to be alive.

It was ardent love, or pain, or nothing. Sometimes nothing really was easiest.

Sometimes love could make her forget.

But pain was, like Damon, the simplest. Not the easiest, by any means, but the only one she really understood.

Until now, that is.

Elena tried not to spit up a mouthful of her blood over his shoulder, onto the back of his black shirt, but couldn't help it. She had every reason to be screaming through her swollen mouth, shrieking for Stefan to come save her from his psychotic brother, but she kept silent. She was scared for her life, yes, and didn't want to piss him off further, but that wasn't the reason, really. Elena knew somehow what this was about, that it wasn't about her at all, that if she could just explain it to him this would all go away, and everything would be alright.

This was not a healthy attitude. But a part of her knew, or could imagine, the pain that had blinded him, and a tiny drip of compassion kept her from hating him utterly; the helplessness of her situation kept her from acting brashly.

It was the intimacy with which he both held and beheld her that kept her from saying a word.

It was the knowledge that this violence and hatred was directed at another, at her Other, the enigma she hated almost as much as she feared, that let her share privately in his pleasure. He and she were united in despising a common enemy, and that vindicated the ugly emotions she'd harboured against both of them.

In all her perverse curiosity, she had often wondered what it must have been like to be her. In receiving Katherine's various punishments, she was given, finally, the chance to be a voyeur into her life. To act like Katherine was to be Katherine, she thought.

She closed her eyes as he pulled gently at her neck from tiny pinprick-holes, and kissed up to her jaw as more blood pooled in the contours of her neck and shoulder. She lost herself to the awful, beautiful feeling. "Damon..."

Hearing his name on her lips, breathy and delirious, was more than he could have asked for. Returning to the lump of her artery, he bit fully and deeply and took a scalding throat full of her blood into himself. The pain, the adrenaline, were too much; the blood diverted from her brain was too much. She was lost in hormonal, anemic white static, a breed of ecstasy with which she was entirely unfamiliar. It left her on edge, a film of destructive urges clinging to the walls of her veins and the roof of her mouth- she wanted to burn, kill, destroy; raze this house, this town to its foundations, and through bringing death, through dying, to isolate that impulse, or quality, or simply absence of something she couldn't name, that had kept her alive this long.

_If you could even call this living._

The town's history, and her role in it, had always skewed the trajectory of her life towards a set of conclusions that had seemed "perfectly fine". She wondered now what would- or could -become of her if she were to free herself from her history, from everything it meant in this world to be Elena Gilbert.

And if she could do whatever she pleased? She would hunt down Katherine and kill her like a dog. For her curse on the boys; for what she'd done to Damon, crimes now rectified on her own innocent body; and for looking so damn much like her. The last was unforgivable.

Lost, still, in a fantasy of a fantasy, Damon kissed her, slowly and softly like he had the night before, and moved his hand from her face to the crook of her knee, pulling her towards him, gentle and needy, by her lower thigh.

Breathing her in like this, willing her to be Elena, he could pretend that her thigh didn't bear that ugly white garter-shaped scar; even in a gesture so familiar he could erase the sensation of its puckered, ragged ridges, gouged, unexplained and inexplicably deep. Like she'd found a fashionable new way to wear a crown of thorns. Now, he didn't even feel it beneath his fingers.

And Elena returned the kiss. She did it, and without guilt, because she wasn't Elena right now, to him or to herself; she was Katherine, and Katherine did what she wanted.

And Stefan? Stefan had no claim on Katherine. And this affection from Damon, like the torture that had come before it, was not meant for her. She felt as if the part of her that was Elena had, for the time being, ceased to exist; the part that remained was entangled in the messy, unthinking lust of it.

His hand gripped her thigh and he broke the kiss, bringing his mouth to kiss her temple, her ear, the space below it.

"_Elena..."_

The Elena part of her, cut loose and left to the ether, rushed back into her in full force. He had broken the spell he had unwittingly cast, and the Elena that thought it was Katherine smartly went into hiding. Everything held suspended by her fantasy shattered, and the horror of what she'd done- of what had been done to her, moreover -hit her. Amongst the various shades of revulsion that attacked her simultaneously was an ounce of anger that she had been deprived of something she wanted very badly. She wouldn't think about what that might be.

He had said her name. She had been wrong – the beating was intended for _her_.

"You son of a _bitch_!" She spat, twisting away from him and against her own useless arms. "Don't you dare touch me! Stefan!" She began sobbing again in earnest, dragging in breath, feeling again like the victim she always was. Damon truly wished her harm and there was no getting around that. There was nothing here to stop him from draining her dry right now – after the beating he'd given her she had no doubt that he was willing and capable.

He yanked her head back by her hair as, caught between snarling and sobbing, she said to him, "What did I _ever_ do to you?"

Damon should have known Katherine would react badly to being called by another woman's name. Likely the first time that had ever happened to her. If he had had the presence of mind not to say a word, things might have ended very differently.

Lifting her by the chin, he looked into her lovely brown eyes, no longer deep-hooded as they had been in his youth, but open and vulnerable. There was a similar tension between hatred and hopelessness working in him, but it came through the intense focus of his eyes, not the strain of his throat. Still, he couldn't find the words. Couldn't look at her. Katherine, the pair of keys you find when you've stopped looking. The missing sock. The stolen car. The fallen soldier.

The undead girlfriend.

"That's just it, isn't it? Nothing. For a century and a half, _nothing._ For a _century_ _and a half_ I thought you were dead or desecrating in a filthy fucking tomb and now here you are, acting like you didn't abandon me to this empty shell of a life."

Sobs shook her chest, but she stayed silent.

"So I pick myself up and take what's left of me and dedicate myself to living as you lived, because that? That's all I have left of you. And that's all I can do with the rest of my long, dismal life."

He leaned in close to her, looking her squarely in the eyes with a rending confusion that she actually did understand. She'd felt like that when she'd first discovered that she was a body double to Stefan's long lost love – there was no answer that could both make sense and be consistent with what she felt for him.

"And when I find out about the tomb, the point and purpose of my life becomes to _get you out_," he said quietly. "You're the reason I'm here. In so many ways, ways you can't possibly imagine, you are the reason for everything." He released her, leaving her squatting on her haunches on the bench, so that she could take him in. "And I am this thing, built in your image, of no value to anyone who matters."

"You have a lot of good in you," she replied. Her tears had paused briefly.

He furrowed his brows a moment. "Someone said that recently." A pause. A dismissal. "It doesn't mean a goddamn thing out of you."

She realized that lashing out- attacking whoever was nearest -was the only thing he knew how to do. She wished she had known him in another life; even in his human life. He really did have good in him.

Her face throbbed, reminding her of how far he was removed from it. It was there, unformed and pure, reactive and inconsistent. Her heart swelled to see it – swelled to match her face.

"She doesn't deserve you," she said muttered.

Before she could look up into his red eyes he had put a stake three inches into her abdomen. The leaking acids began to sear like poured lead, and she could only breathe into the tops of her lungs. White hot pain- and fear of its amplification -kept her stalk-still.

He _had_ killed her, after all.

"If you _ever_ say a word about Elena again I'll make sure this ends up in your heart, and I will not regret a goddamned thing. You are _nothing_ next to her."

"Damon," she rasped. "Get...Stefan..." She dragged a breath in, wincing and crying out. "Please..."

Her breathing became laboured and irregular, and she hung heavy from the short-chained manacles that held back her hands. She cried softly, trying to breathe as little as possible. Trying to keep her muscles lax, or taut, or whatever would keep it from hurting like she'd been set on fire. Crouched on the bench, the towel had ridden up her legs, revealing her unmarred thighs.

He hadn't felt Katherine's scar because there was no scar: this was not Katherine. Details rearranged and made a new kind of sense.

"Oh, shit."

He fumbled with the key in the lock, freeing her from the manacles. She slumped down onto herself, her arms too numb and strained to be useful. He picked her up, leaving the stake in place. He carried her, with vampire speed, up into the house.

"I've made a huge mistake," was all he said, mostly to himself.

_Yes? No? Hell, No? You-Should-Be-Shot NO? Drop a line, will respond (eventually) :) Thanks for reading!_


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